ARTICLE

Joint PP and PS anisotropic AVO inversion using the exact Zoeppritz equations

YIFEI BAO1* JINGYI CHEN1 XIAOBO LIU2 ZHENCONG ZHAO1
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1 Seismic Anisotropy Group, Department of Geosciences, the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK 74104, U.S.A.,
2 School of Geophysics and Information Technology, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, P.R. China.,
* School of Sciences, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P.R. China.,
JSE 2021, 30(6), 529–544;
Submitted: 9 June 2025 | Revised: 9 June 2025 | Accepted: 9 June 2025 | Published: 9 June 2025
© 2025 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

With increasing complexity of the geological structure, the conventional amplitude variation with offset (AVO) inversion methods based on the approximate Zoeppritz equations are not suitable for the current direct hydrocarbon detection. The linearized approximations of the Zoeppritz equations work well under the conditions of weak contrast boundary and small incident angle, which not only restrict the scope of application but also reduce the accuracy of the inversion results. Furthermore, since the seismic anisotropy has been found in many regions of the Earth’s subsurface, the assumption of isotropic elastic media cannot exactly describe the subsurface properties. Therefore, we develop an anisotropic AVO inversion method by replacing the approximate isotropic Zoeppritz equations with the exact isotropic Zoeppritz equations, and the Rtiger’s approximations are still used in the anisotropic perturbation part. In addition, we add the PS seismic data as a new constrained condition to improve the inversion results. In this study, we also obtain the analytical expressions of the derivatives of reflection coefficients with respect to unknown parameters (e.g., P- and S- wave velocities, density and Thomsen parameters: ¢ and 0). Given more parameters are required in anisotropic AVO inversion, the instability of the solution becomes a critical problem. We conduct the Marquardt method to enhance the stability during the inversion process. In this paper, we use a synthetic seismic data with ideal and noisy situations to verify the performance of the proposed AVO inversion algorithm. The final inversion results indicate that our new method works well to obtain the elastic parameters (density, P- and S-wave velocities) and Thomsen parameters.

Keywords
exact Zoeppritz equations
transversely isotropy
PP and PS reflection coefficients
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing